Newborn baby boy gift

Houghton Mifflin. 192p. illus. c2003. 0-618-28231-9. $15.00. JS

Inspired by old photos (reproduced at the beginning of each chapter), Lowry has fashioned an affecting and ultimately tragic tale set nearly a hundred years ago in a small farm community. Katy, the young daughter of the local doctor, tells the story. She is curious and clever, and plans to become a doctor herself; we know from the prologue, which is set in 1987, that she achieves her goal. When Katy is almost eight, she accompanies her father on a trip to the countryside to bring home their new hired girl, Peggy, and briefly glimpses Peggy's "touched" younger brother, Jacob, who is 13. Jacob doesn't speak, or go to school, but he helps out on the farm and has a special, gentle way with animals: when a mother sheep rejects her lamb, he convinces another sheep to suckle it. Over the next year, Katy forges a friendship of sorts with shy Jacob. In contrast, Peggy and Jacob's older sister Nellie, a hired girl at the household next door to Katy, is an outgoing, flamboyant type, who responds to the advances of the teenage son in that family. When Nellie becomes pregnant, she returns home to have the baby, but rejects it when it is born. Jacob then takes the fragile newborn and carries it for miles through cold and rain to Katy's household, hoping, perhaps, that Katy's mother, who has recently had a baby herself, will care for this unwanted infant, like the sheep did with the lamb. But the baby is found dead in Katy's sister's crib, and Jacob is taken off to the asylum, never to be seen by Katy again.

Much of the story is given over to Katy's happy reminiscences of her childhood, from making a snowman to getting a kitten as a gift from Jacob, seeing the town's first motorcar, and celebrating her ninth birthday. The few dark notes, such as learning about the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire and visiting the asylum with her father, do not prepare the reader for the events at the end that unfold so tragically and yet so logically, giving them an even greater impact. This is a thoughtful and dark work, with carefully drawn characters, that imaginatively brings to life a rural community of a century ago. Like many of Lowry's other works, it raises moral and ethical issues in a challenging and subtle fashion.